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after all, thought Stroud. He swallowed this news with calm acceptance while Carroll said, “By golly, you said he'd have a dog with him.”
    Stroud gently told Joey to continue.
    “Dish!” Joey near shouted it.
    “Dish?”
    “Called his dog Dish,” said Ray Carroll.
    “Short for Dishrag,” added Joey, his eyes widening. “Ain't that funny?”
    Stroud intentionally called the boy Joe. “Joe, did Dish find the bones and start tearing at them?”
    “Yes, sir.”
    “And you boy's did what?”
    “Tried to pull him away. First we didn't know what he'd run up on. We just wanted to keep going, but Dish wouldn't leave it alone. So, Timmy, he went back for him.”
    “Alone?”
    “Yes, sir.”
    “But you all saw the dog was into a bone pile, is that right?”
    “Some of the boys said it was old animal bones where a coon died or something. We didn't want nothing to do with it. Then Timmy went back for Dish ... and he ... and he...”
    “He what, son? What did he do?”
    “He snatched up the head with its hole eyes, trying to scare us when we come through the trees.”
    Carroll and Abe Stroud exchanged a look, Stroud glad that he'd kept the skull on the seat in his car. Eventually he'd see to it that the skull got a thorough going over. For a moment he flashed on Bill Briggs's toying with the other skull on TV. To Stroud the grown man's behavior was far more sick and ludicrous than eleven- and twelve-year-olds playing with the horrid mask of death deep in the wood.
    “So, Timmy scared you all and you left him there?”
    “No, sir! I wasn't scared. Some of 'em were, but not me.”
    Stroud calmed the child's indignity at having been called a coward in front of his father. “Sorry, Joe, I didn't mean you. But now, remember, Timmy held the skull's eyes up at you all and shouted something like  boooooo!  right?”
    “He tried.”
    “What do you mean, he tried?”
    “Dog, that dog, Dish.”
    “What about Dish?”
    “He didn't like it, not a bit. He, he jumped onto Timmy's back and started growlin' at him, so Timmy threw the skull down, claiming it bit him, crying and showing his fingers where he said the-the skull bit him!”
    Carroll's wife chuckled nervously, and Carroll said, “Boys ... what imaginations.”
    “What happened to Timmy then, Joe? Joe?”
    “He run off.”
    “Ran off? Alone?”
    “Deeper into the woods.”
    “Really, and what about Dish?”
    “Dish run right along with him, nipping at him like it was all a game. Dish was getting weird though.”
    “Weird?”
    “Growly and snarly, like a wolf all of a sudden.”
    “What happened next?”
    “Nothing.”
    “Nothing?”
    “Nothing else happened. It was dark, and we ... we knew we'd best get home, or get a tannin', so...”
    “You all allowed Timmy to run deeper into the wood, while the rest of you went home?”
    “Yes, sir,” he replied, looking to his parents, tired of this game now.
    “I think Joey's had quite enough,” said Mrs. Carroll, a thin woman wearing a nightgown that hung limp around her small frame, glasses perched on her nose, somewhat plain and bitchy looking, Stroud felt.
    “It really is late,” said Carroll, weakly agreeing.
    “Sure, sure. Thank you, Joe,” said Abe Stroud to the boy. Joey Carroll just looked over his shoulder and gave the strangest smile Stroud had ever seen in a child his age. It was not snide or spiteful, but a knowing smile, as if to say in an old man's wink, “I know you've had a tough night, too.” Then the boy was gone, and Stroud stood staring at Carroll.
    “What do you make of it?” he asked Carroll.
    “Make of it?”
    “The boy's story.”
    “Sounds like boys at play to me.”
    “Sounds like something's missing to me.”
    “Joey's no liar,” his mother defended him.
    “No matter what mistakes he and the other boys made,” said Carroll, “Joey wouldn't lie to us. He said he saw the boy before dinner, and that's the last he saw of Timmy Meyers.”
    “He's chosen to leave